No more "OK Google" search on Chromebooks? Facebook profit spikes 71%, laws of Australia trump laws of mathematics? Waze is now on Android Auto, and more.
Interesting that all the growth in mobile ads has recently gone to Facebook and Google. I’m surprised that no one else is eating up even a small piece of the pie.
I also loved the story about the Australian prime minister, in a post-fact world, indicating that the laws of mathematics don’t take precedence over those of Australia.
Musical Podcasts. Google Glass for Enterprise. New Google Feed. Better Google Analytics. Facebook News Subscription. Amazon Meal Kits, Spark, Treasure Truck, and Outfit Compare. Samsung Bixby arrives in the US. Net Neutrality Day results.
Musical podcasts sound like an interesting proposition, but are likely better as a larger production stream. I’m curious what the budget was for the piece and how they’re monetizing it?
I’ve been wondering about Bixby on my Samsung 8, but somehow I’ve never really bothered to use it. It doesn’t seem as interesting or as easy to use as my Amazon Alexa. Perhaps it’s time to dig into it a bit? I have been enjoying some minor Alexa use on my phone recently. I’m curious how they compare now.
Jonathan Levine will direct and Kenya Barris will write a sequel to ‘Coming to America’, which is being developed with cooperation from Eddie Murphy.
It’s not unusual for a 65-year-old to announce his retirement, but a lot of people were caught by surprise when Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee did so on Tuesday. In a statement, the senator, who has found himself increasingly at odds with President Trump, said he he hadn’t planned to serve more than two terms in office. But is there more at work in the departure of this influential senator than simple adherence to a self-imposed term limit? What does it portend for the Republican Party establishment, Trump and the future of the party? There are a few ways to think about it.
Roughly speaking, an ergodic system is one that mixes well. You get the same result whether you average its values over time or over space. This morning I ran across the etymology of the word ergodic.
At Signal, we’ve been thinking about the difficulty of private contact discovery for a long time. We’ve been working on strategies to improve our current design, and today we’ve published a new private contact discovery service. Using this service, Signal clients will be able to efficiently and scalably determine whether the contacts in their address book are Signal users without revealing the contacts in their address book to the Signal service.
h/t cryptographer Matthew Green
Private contact discovery for Signal. Make no mistake: what Moxie is doing here is going to revolutionize messaging. https://t.co/RjAMWIpXui
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 26, 2017
In short: your contact list will no longer be available to Signal servers. If you trust Intel SGX this wipes out a load of info leakage.
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 26, 2017
Today is the Net Neutrality Day of Action. Go to BattleForTheNet.com and write your congressperson. Also, The Pixel XL 2 may feature a squeezable frame. Allo is coming to the desktop in "a few weeks." Android 7.1 has "Panic Detection" mode. Facebook will sell ads in Messenger. Amazon Prime Day sales up 60% over last year's record-setting haul - with Echo Dot as the top-selling item. Samsung Galaxy Note 8 may explode onto the scene on August 23rd. Make Nokia great again. China teleports matter to space. Jeff's Numbers: Google spends $800,000 on newsbots that write 30,000 articles a month in the UK. Google doesn't owe France 1.1bn euros in back taxes. Danny's Stuff: Silk Vault Slim Wallet Case, The Big Sick Stacey's Thing: Fibaro HomeKit Sensors
We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).
I have taken to always posting on my own website(s) first–where the sky is the proverbial limit–and only then syndicating out to places like Twitter. While Twitter’s got a reasonable network and there are lots of interesting people who might not otherwise be online interacting, I really haven’t been using Twitter as much in the past two years as I had previously. This change isn’t going to affect me at all from a publishing perspective. There are much more valuable tools to be using now. (Though I do wish the rest of the web would catch up on some of the new technologies they’re really missing out on.)
I do appreciate that it will allow some others who don’t have their own websites some more flexibility. I’m hoping that the Twitter apps that handle notifications add the extra content as Twitter’s own mobile app notifications cut off even before the 140 character limit, which makes them painful to use from a UI perspective.
If nothing else, it’s nice to see them iterating a little, but they need to be doing it at a faster velocity.
Jr. reportedly has his Secret Service protection back, sources told CNN. The news comes after a previous report that Trump Jr. gave up his protection from the Secret Service because of privacy concerns. A senior administration official told The New York Times earlier this month the Secret Service had stopped protecting Trump Jr.
Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons. This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.
EU fines Google €2.42 billion, Canada demands global de-listing. Google News' redesign causes Jeff concern. YouTube Party. Amazon Show unboxing. Facebook hits 2 billion users. Petya ransomware may be retaliation for Russian cyberwarfare on Ukraine. Jeff's report from Vidcon.
https://youtu.be/bRI078mWrxg
Leo, Jeff, and Stacey are all off this week, so Jason Howell, Ron Richards, and Kevin Marks are in charge. The Essential phone will be a Sprint exclusive, but that doesn't mean you can't buy one and use it with whatever service you want. Google's successor to the Pixel XL may be getting even bigger, and might get made by LG this time around. The current Pixel XL will self-destruct on October of 2018. Google's cute little self-driving cars are self-driving off into the sunset. Google Drive wants to back up your whole computer. Softbank is buying Boston Dynamics. Google's Project Sunroof lets you know which neighbors have solar power. Facebook expands safety check in a possibly stressful way. Kevin's Pick: IndieWeb and IndieWeb Summit Ron's Pick: Astro Jason's Pick: pix2pix fotogenerator
The conversation about how Facebook is doing their safety check is intriguing. How should they be doing it better to inform people who might be concerned, but without creating undue stress to others who generally aren’t involved or nearby? This is particularly interesting to me as I’m often near to frequent forest fires in Los Angeles, not to mention the future potential of major earthquake events.
In recent months, I’ve been learning a lot about the “IndieWeb,” an idea spread by folks who understand that the Web offers a unique platform where ordinary people without the financial clout of the 20th century publishing industry could still potentially reach millions with their ideas.
But to be honest, I’m not sure I can tell you why — and how — to join up any better than Chris Aldrich did in this piece on AltPlatform. So just go over there now.
I know Michael has been working at the IndieWeb bit for a while, so this is some nice praise.
What computers teach us about getting along. From an office at Carnegie Mellon, my colleague John Miller and I had evolved a computer program with a taste for genocide.
This article reminds me that I need to go back to reading Fukuyama’s two volume series (Origins of Political Order) and apply more math to it as a model. I can see some interesting evolution of political structures spread throughout the modern world and still want a more concrete answer for the jumps between them. I suspect that some of our world problems are between more advanced political economies and less advanced (more tribalistic ones — read Middle Eastern as well as some third world nations) which are working on different life-ways. Are there punctuated equilibrium between the political structures of economies like the graph in this paper? What becomes the tipping point that pushes one from one region to the next?
I also feel a bit like our current political climate has changed so significantly in the past 20 years that it’s possible we (America) may be regressing.
Check out this referenced paper:
🔖 Barasz, M., et al. Robust cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Program equilibrium via provability logic. arXiv 1401.5577 (2014).
It’s an endearing, giant, flightless, New Zealand parrot, and it’s a poster child for the quantified-self movement.
